Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/86

76 Now, the utmost that can be said is that theology has asserted an analogy more or less strong between the phenomena of Nature and human beings. Personality entire has never been attributed in any theology to deities. Personality, as we know it, involves mortality. Deities are always supposed immortal. Personality involves a body. The highest theologies have declared God to be incorporeal. We are brought back, then, to the will. Theologies attribute to deities a will like that of human beings. They do so; but again the highest theologies assert that the Divine Will is high above the human; that there is "no searching" of it; "that as the heaven is high above the earth, so are his ways than our ways, and his thoughts than our thoughts."

If the possibility of miracles were entirely given up, and the order of Nature decided to be as invariable as science inclines to consider it; if all the appearances of benevolent design in the universe were explained away, it might be true that the belief in God would cease to be consoling. Instead of being a spring of life and activity, it might—I am not now saying it would—become a depressing and overwhelming influence. And this, no doubt, is what people mean when they identify, as they commonly do, the belief in God with belief in an overruling Benevolence, and in the supernatural. They mean to say, not exactly that the belief in God is necessarily this, but that to be in any way useful or beneficial it must necessarily be this. But for my present purpose it is important to distinguish between the God in whom ordinary people at the present day believe, and a God of another character in whom they might conceivably believe. I desire to insist upon the point that when science speaks of God as a myth or an hypothesis, and declares the existence of God to be doubtful, and destined always to remain doubtful, it is speaking of a particular conception of God, of God conceived as benevolent, as outside of Nature, as personal, as the cause of phenomena. Do these attributes of benevolence, personality, etc., exhaust the idea of God? Are they—not merely the most important, the most consoling of his attributes, but—the only ones? By denying them do we cease not merely to be orthodox Christians, but to be theists?

Science opposes to God Nature. When it denies God it denies the existence of any power beyond or superior to Nature; and it may deny at the-same time any thing like a cause of Nature. It believes in certain laws of coexistence and sequence in phenomena, and in denying God it means to deny that any thing further can be known. God and Nature, then, express ideas which are different in an important particular. But it is evident enough that these ideas are not the opposites that controversy would represent them to be. On the contrary, they coincide up to a certain point. Those who believe in Nature may deny God, but those who believe in God believe, as a matter of course, in Nature also. The belief in God includes the belief in